


Reckoning

by SemperIntrepida



Series: Elegiad [4]
Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Playthrough, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, a slight divergence from canon but we'll get to the same place in the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-15
Updated: 2019-11-15
Packaged: 2021-01-31 02:43:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21438892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SemperIntrepida/pseuds/SemperIntrepida
Summary: In which Kassandra hunts for a Wolf and exerts her influence during the Battle of Megaris the best way she knows how: with the point of her spear.
Series: Elegiad [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1531004
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31





	Reckoning

**Author's Note:**

> This one-shot is part of a linked series of stories, and while you don't have to read them all, they do combine into a unified narrative.

The night before the Spartans invaded Megaris, the stray dogs that usually hung around the forward camp suddenly disappeared, and Kassandra overheard the men muttering about ill omens and unfavorable winds. A foreboding mood had enveloped the camp as soon as word of the invasion order had begun to spread, and it snuffed out the ribald jokes and dark humor that normally accompanied the places where the soldiers liked to gather.

The order to invade had come from the Wolf of Sparta, General of the Armies — a man once known in simpler times as Nikolaos, father of Kassandra and Alexios, and twenty years ago he'd thrown her off a cliff because the Oracle told him to.

Kassandra could not sleep, and in her restlessness she had wandered from her bedroll at the far edge of the fort's walls, where the non-citizens pitched their tents, and into the heart of the Spartan encampment. Now she was a stranger among the familiar, and though the Spartans didn't recognize her, she certainly knew them, for tradition was their way, and their ways rarely changed.

Soon after her arrival in Megaris, she'd taken up the Spartan habit of constantly wearing a helmet while stationed on the front, as a matter of caution given the volleys of Athenian arrows that often rained down on the fort. But she had another reason to obscure her face behind a helm, for it would make it harder for someone to connect her to her mother, or even to Leonidas, her grandfather. The Agiad bloodline ran deep, and it shone in her eyes and in the curve of her cheekbones.

It made her a ghost among the living.

She'd spent weeks in Megaris, present but unseen, undermining the Athenian forces from within and preparing the way for a full-scale Spartan invasion — all at the behest of Stentor, the Wolf's adopted son. Apparently it was as easy for the Wolf to obtain a new family as it was for him to destroy his old one. Though it rankled her greatly, she worked tirelessly under Stentor's command. She stole supplies from the Port of Nisaia, looted the state coffers out from under the stratego in command of Fort Geraneia, killed the misthios hired to organize the capital city's defenses, and then, soon after, assassinated the Megaran leader himself. The people of Megaris began to whisper of a Spartan ghost that walked among them, but it wasn't Sparta she had done all these things for, but herself. She would give the Wolf no choice but to meet her in person, and when the Wolf was no longer the Wolf, but just a man, she'd make him answer for the things he had done.

But first, she had a battle to survive.

She walked past tent after tent, hearing quiet voices, the occasional cough, someone snoring in the distance, and the soft rasp of blades against whetstones. There were hundreds of soldiers here, and hundreds more on the Athenian side, and soon they'd come together in a battle larger than anything she'd ever fought in before.

Her feet kept moving, past tents and campfires, drawn towards the ringing sound of metal against anvil. As she approached the smith's forge, she saw that the smith was a perioikoi — a free man, but not a citizen, one of the thousands who labored at the tasks the Spartans felt were beneath them, which were most things not involving combat or chariot racing.

"Eh, misthios!" he called out as she passed. "How about a new sword before tomorrow's excitement?"

That brought her closer to his stall, and to his table of wares: a variety of leaf-shaped spearheads, and a row of bronze and iron swords in the short xiphos and curved kopis styles that the Spartans favored. The deadly metal gleamed gold and silver in the glow of the forge.

"Go on, pick one up," he encouraged.

Her fingers curled around the smooth wooden handle of an iron-bladed xiphos, and she lifted it, felt its weight and balance, and then guided it through a series of slow, controlled swings. It was light — as light as her broken spear, and almost its same length, more a dagger than a sword.

"I'd forgotten that Spartans preferred shorter blades" she said.

The smith smirked. "They're long enough to reach an Athenian heart."

That was true, but only in very close combat, after the enemy had closed the distance and a spear only got in the way. She studied the sword, noted its straight lines and carefully inset fittings. Even the handle had been polished to a shine, the forge-light bringing out the layered depths within the grain of the wood. It was an excellent sword, and it would cost far more drachmae than she had the resources for, especially now that she had an entire ship to maintain and a crew to pay and feed. Everything she'd stolen from the Athenians in Megaris had been sold to make this month's wages.

"Beautiful work," she said, setting the sword down next to its brethren. "But my purse is a bit light at the moment."

The smith moved out from the shadows behind the table, and in the light she could see the rivulets of sweat that ran through the metal dust that coated his skin. His face was ruddy and his eyes were fixed into a squint from the heat blast of the forge. He looked her up and down. Then he tentatively reached for her sword hand, his eyebrow raised, asking her permission, and when she nodded yes, he took her hand in his own. His thick fingers prodded her palm and worked her wrist back and forth, looking for something unseen to her eyes. "Huh," he said, as if surprised. "You'd probably make a good smith. You're built for it."

She grinned and said, "Probably. But your job's safe for now."

He threw up his hands in mock surprise. "A misthios with a sense of humor! And on the eve of battle. You _are_ a strange one, aren't you?" He studied her face through his squint. "Let me see your sword."

Kassandra handed it over silently, and he hummed as he hefted it, gave it a few experimental swings, and held the hilt up to his nose so he could peer down the length of its blade.

"Well, it won't get you killed," he said. "But I can make it better." He took the sword back to his workbench and started tinkering, and she heard several loud hammer taps followed by the scrape of metal on a sharpening stone. The rhythmic sound was calming, and she watched the smith's shadow play against the stone chimney of the forge while he worked. After a while, he turned to a long strip of leather that hung from the roof beam and stropped the edges of the sword against it until they gleamed in the firelight. "There," he said when he was finished, handing the sword back to her. "Engraved with the mark of Ares. It'll be a little hungrier for blood from now on."

She tested the blade's edge against her thumbnail, pleased to see it shave slivers off with ease. He even managed to remove the deep gouges that she'd never been able to sharpen out on her own. But when she held out a palmful of drachmae in payment, he only picked out a few coins and left the rest.

"Ares guide your blade, misthios," he said. "Get yourself paid, and we'll see about getting you one of my swords."

Her visit with the smith had helped quiet some of the restlessness in her blood. She needed sleep, and dawn would arrive soon enough. She retraced her steps back through the tents, along the fort walls, and down to her bed, chasing Hypnos, and when she finally dreamed, she dreamt of falling.

.oOo. 

Kassandra's first taste of organized battle began within the vanguard of the Spartan forces, a mix of free men, conscripted helots, and hired mercenaries that guarded the advance of the rest of the army. They had expected attacks from enemy archers and javelin throwers along the way, but their march to the battlefield had met no resistance. The Athenians had chosen to concentrate their ranged defenses along the sides of their phalanxes. Each phalanx was a wide formation of soldiers several rows deep, protected by interlocking shields and bristling with spears, and two of them awaited the Spartans at the other side of the field.

She heard shouting from behind, and slowly the vanguard shifted around her as they began marching to the left, taking on more of a skirmisher role and clearing a path for the Spartan phalanxes to assemble in formation across from their Athenian counterparts.

Thus the Battle of Megaris began with a staredown between two armies.

Beside her, a young helot wearing a worn tunic and a helmet at least two sizes too big for him shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot. She clapped a hand down on his shoulder and said, "When the fighting starts, never stop moving."

He nodded at her with wide eyes, and Kassandra wondered how a small support force of lightly armed farmers and slaves could accomplish much of anything against a full phalanx.

Then a hush settled over the Spartan side, as if they'd all taken one collective breath, and then there was a shout that drove everyone into a headlong charge, the skirmishers and phalanxes moving together in one continuous line, like a great wave headed for shore. The nervous energy was gone in an instant, everyone a part of a single purposeful unit as they charged across the battlefield, and the feeling of focus and unity lasted just as long for the skirmishers to come within range of the Athenian archers, for as soon as the first of them began to be felled by arrows and javelins, their advance wavered while the Spartan phalanxes continued on, their shields protecting them from the dangers overhead.

The man in front of her stumbled and fell, skewered by a javelin through his chest, and she reached down and grabbed his shield without missing a step, holding it up before her so she could duck under it as she ran. She'd somehow ended up near the front of the supporting charge, and she could see the Spartans up ahead on a collision course for the Athenian lines.

Arrows bounced off her shield as she charged forward, and she heard a roar as the Spartans slammed into the Athenians, their advance coming to a sudden stop. She thought she heard a familiar voice within the fray, shouting, "Push forward, men! _Push!_" The phalanxes would remain locked in a stalemate until one of the front lines broke. The men who didn't break would be the victors.

Up ahead was the Athenian skirmisher line, positioned to defend the vulnerable side of the enemy phalanx. She drew her sword and picked out an enemy hoplite, just as the point of a javelin suddenly burst through the wooden core of her shield, pelting her with splinters. She flung the shield and javelin into the hoplite's face and stabbed him with her sword in one smooth motion. Then she drew her broken spear with her free hand and descended into a maelstrom of chaos.

It was quickly apparent to Kassandra that in a battle like this, there was no time for fancy moves or blocking defense. If it wasn't a slice or a parry, it was too slow, and slow meant danger lurking from all sides.

Kassandra cut her way through the front ranks of Athenian skirmishers with ease, aided by her unconventional use of a sword and what was essentially a long dagger against men armed with swords alone. But then she reached a squad of hoplites armed with swords _and_ shields, and her progress ground to a halt.

How in Hades was she going to break through _that_ many shields before their swords hacked her to bits?

She slid her spear into its sheath on her back and focused on attacking with her sword, and soon found that a heavy sword strike to a shield could knock an enemy backward — but more often than not, that just meant another interchangeable hoplite would take his place. There were far too many of them for her to remain locked in a defensive battle, and if she didn't come up with a plan in the next few moments she'd find herself surrounded by a wall of shields and sharp swords that she'd never come out from alive.

As the hoplites began to close in, she fended off the nearest one's attacks while studying the edges of his shield, and when the idea came to her she almost laughed at the simplicity of it, and its absurd amount of risk. In one sudden motion, she stepped right inside his sword range, reached across her body with her left hand, and grabbed the rightmost edge of his shield before yanking it back across her body with everything she had. As soon as she felt him lose his grip on the shield, she pulled it free and slammed it back into his chest, knocking him backwards so hard that he took out the man behind him as well.

The other hoplites hesitated. That just made it easier for her to pull off the same move a second time, rushing up to the next man, yanking his shield free and launching it at his head. The impact knocked him out instantly.

She swapped her sword for her spear and began to laugh, as a sense of unstoppable power flowed up from within, insulating her from the chaos as everything moved just a step slower than she could. Parry, shield break, thrust spear into the side of a throat. Parry, shield break, sink spear deep into a belly. She was close to the Athenian phalanx now, and could see the two front lines locked in combat.

Somewhere within that scrum was the Wolf, and she intended for him to witness the tide of this battle turn at _her_ command.

As she carved a path straight for the vulnerable side of the Athenian phalanx, she heard the howling war cries of friendly fighters as they fell in behind her. She was the order in the chaos, and when she reached the first row of Athenian spears, she used a stolen shield to knock the spearpoints aside before plunging into their ranks. Up ahead was an Athenian captain, easily identified by the colorful crest on his helmet, and she knew that if she cut down all their captains it would be like cutting the head off a snake.

The Athenian phalanx was beginning to lose its cohesion, and its men began to flee once they realized they were within a Spartan pincer grip on two sides. Kassandra sought out the first captain, let him come to her, then dodged the lunging attack of his spear. As soon as it passed, she slid inside and shoved her spear through his ribs and into his heart.

The second captain still had his shield, and her new trick worked just as well on him as it had with all the others. But as he staggered from being struck by his own shield, he slammed the shaft of his spear down hard on her armored shoulder and her left arm suddenly went numb from neck to wrist. He went for his sword, but she was already there to meet him with a looping slice of her spear that separated the fingers from his hand and the entrails from his belly.

Her body sang for more. Her blood thrummed with power and craving and a vast _want_ that grew with every breath. She shook the numbness out of her arm and looked out over the battlefield, seeing nothing but targets.

The final captain was a massive brute of a man, armed with a heavy axe and accompanied by three hoplite escorts, who immediately charged at her approach. She reared back and kicked the first man into the second, then parried a sword strike from the third before rolling to dodge what would have been a crushing blow from the captain's axe.

She glanced around, saw the first man unconscious, the second staggering back to his feet, the third circling to her left, and the captain moving to her right. The scene began to play out before her like a prophecy. She somehow knew the captain would swing his axe around in a wide circle, so she launched herself into a sliding tackle that let the axe pass harmlessly overhead and ended with her taking the second man's legs out from under him. They collapsed in a tangle of limbs, yet she never stopped moving, and she stuck her spear in his throat, in and out, before she rolled back to her feet. The third man was on the verge of panic, his sword moving erratically with his frantic swings, but she somehow knew which way his blade would go — and that the captain was readying another attack of his own. She maneuvered the third man around with a combination of parries and swipes from her spear, causing him to backpedal, until her final swing put him into the path of the captain's incoming axe. The blow nearly cut him in half.

The captain bellowed with rage. "Mercenary scum! You'll die now!"

She wouldn't, of course. Not when she could leap out of the way of his axe, and circle back around to his blind spot, and sink her spear deep into his back as he let out a ghastly roar of frustration. It took five stabs for him to die, and when he finally toppled over, all the remaining Athenians fled the field.

Kassandra watched them run, then slowly turned towards the Spartan forces, knowing every eye was upon her. But there was only one set of eyes she cared about in this moment, and they belonged to the Wolf, who watched her in silence from what had been the front line of the phalanx. She matched his gaze moment for moment as she reached back and sheathed her spear. Then the Wolf gave her a nod of acknowledgement and turned away.

It was time for the Spartans to gather the dead, but that wasn't her job. She'd won a far more important prize, and very soon it would be time for her to collect.

.oOo. 

The Wolf wanted to see Kassandra and Kassandra alone. She had to admit a certain amount of satisfaction at the discomfort this caused Stentor. Was the poor boy jealous? Too damn bad.

It was also satisfying to see a Spartan honor guard lined up along the path to the top of the cliff where the Wolf awaited, even if it was bound to make her escape more difficult if her visit with him went the way she thought it would. And the Wolf's choice of venue couldn't have been more appropriate.

Once she reached the pinnacle, she saw him standing near the cliff's edge with his back towards her, looking at the sea.

Her feet stopped moving, rooted by the memories that suddenly shuddered through her. Her mother's desperate cries. Alexios disappearing over the edge. And how it felt to fall and fall. She closed her eyes and thought of snow on Mount Taygetos, and she wrapped herself in that cold until the shuddering stopped. It was time. She took off her helm and set it down next to the path. There was no longer a need to hide her face, and when the Wolf turned around to meet her, the way his eyes widened told her she'd become a ghost made flesh.

"Hello, father. It's been a long time." How odd it was to stand with their eyes at the same level when he had always loomed over her in her memories.

"Impossible. I saw you fall."

_Fall?_ "I didn't fall. You fucking threw me to my death."

"I did what was required of me as a Spartan."

He would have allowed the priests to throw his own son off a cliff. And after her disastrous attempt to save her baby brother had seen both her brother and the Elder priest fall to their deaths, Nikolaos had tried to execute _her_ by his own hand. She never expected him to say anything else, or do anything other than hide behind duty like it would absolve all sins. He was her father. She hated that fact almost as much as she hated him and his duty to Sparta. Rage crept into her heart, burning the way cold iron could burn.

Nikolaos must have sensed it within her. "I can't change the past, Kassandra," he said, with the wounded dignity of a man who knew the Fates had caught up to him. "I will live and die a Spartan."

Then her hands were on him, her fingers curling around the straps of his armor, pushing him back, back to the edge so that his upper body hung over the precipice.

So close. She was so close to flinging him off the top of the cliff. It would be fitting for him to fall long enough to be aware of what was happening, to know that death was moments away and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He wouldn't even have a pile of rotting corpses to cushion _his_ landing.

It would be so easy: a push, her fingers letting go, a man falling in space. If she would just open her fingers... If she would just—

Instead, she pulled him back from the brink and tossed him to the ground with a frustrated cry, turning away from him to face the hills and the battlefield and the sea far below.

"Though you deserve death, there is no honor in vengeance," she said, the words so bitter on her tongue that she wasn't sure she believed them. There wasn't much honor in killing for drachmae either. But _something_ had stayed her hand. Perhaps she wanted him to keep suffering, to keep facing the same ghosts she had for the past twenty years. There was no peace to be made here.

Nikolaos lay in a heap at her feet. "I have failed in my duty. I failed to protect you — to protect both of you," he said, a broken man confessing to his gods, and Kassandra knew his words weren't meant for her. But then he pulled himself up on his knees and said, "I loved you and your brother as if you were truly my own. But you were never mine."

The very air seemed to close in around her as she realized what he meant. It wasn't possible. Her ears no longer heard sounds, her skin no longer felt the breeze, and her vision narrowed to the deep lines on his face and the haunted look in his eyes.

Her first memory: running barefoot at home with uneven toddler steps, a stick held fast in her fist, poking him in the knee as she shrieked her fiercest battlecry. Strong arms lifting her up. His chest rumbling with laughter. "Look, Myrrine — Great Lycurgus has sent us a hero!"

Nikolaos was a flawed man, but he was no liar. If he said something, he believed it to be the truth.

"Find your mother," he said.

How many revelations must she bear? Her blood began to roar in her ears like waves in a storm. "Find her?" she heard herself say, but she was already unmoored, roiling in rough seas with nothing but deep water beneath her.

"Wherever Myrrine is, she knows far more than I do," he said, before he turned and walked away in search of the honor he'd lost when he put his duty to Sparta before the family he'd sworn to protect. Kassandra let him go, too dazed to argue or do much of anything other than stand there in stunned silence. "Beware the snakes in the grass, Kassandra," he said in warning, and then he disappeared into the forest that shrouded the top of the mountain above them, a wolf slipping back into shadows.

He'd left her with so much to think about that nothing came to mind. The foundations of her history had shifted, tilting everything built upon them. She was not who she thought she was.

She picked up Nikolaos's helm and sword from where he'd discarded them in the dirt, staring at them without seeing, and when the first of the Spartan guardsmen arrived at the top of the cliff, that is how they found her.

The shouts were loud and immediate: "The General's gone!" and "She's killed the Wolf!" and it wasn't true but it was Nikolaos's parting gift, for Sparta would surely blame her for his sudden disappearance.

The time for thinking was later. The time for leaving was now. She quickly pulled his helm onto her head and drew her own sword, and now she had two swords and the means to chop through the spear shafts the guardsmen had crossed to block her way. Beyond the first two guards was the curving path down the mountain with a sheer rock wall to her right and a steep drop-off to her left, and the gauntlet of soldiers she'd have to run if she wanted to escape.

All the guardsmen were without their shields, as no one had really expected to find themselves in battle during this time of celebration, but they all had spears, and if Kassandra wasn't careful she'd find herself impaled on the end of one.

She spun her swords around and dared them to come get her, and as soon as one attacked, she hacked his spear in two at the shaft. Dodging and chopping, she cut a path through the thicket of spearpoints, always pressing forward, always moving, before someone got the bright idea of trying to clobber her with a spear shaft.

Halfway down the path, she looked ahead and saw a squad of fully-armed Spartans assembling at the bottom. Together, they'd link their shields like a turtle's shell, and once they started marching up the path, she'd be boxed in from the front and the rear.

The rock face to her right was far too steep to climb, so she chose the least worst option and jumped right off the side of the path and down the steep hillside, somehow managing to keep her feet in front of her as she slid through the underbrush, branches bouncing off her armor and tearing at her skin. The bottom was a long way away.

A fallen pine tree lay snagged against another tree just ahead, leaving a worryingly small gap between the bulk of its trunk and the ground. With her momentum too great to stop or even change course, all she could do was lean back into the slide and hope she could squeeze through. She did, barely, bark scraping, pine needles showering upon her, almost losing the Wolf's helm and his sword along the way, but her right wrist smacked against an underhanging branch and she lost her grip on her old sword. Ares's mark had served her well, and it would be her offering to Pan, then, in exchange for escaping this wild mountainside.

Finally the slope began to level out and she went from sliding to running, chased by the echoes of shouts from far above. She flew out of the forest underbrush at a full run. If she could just get to the port before the Spartans sent soldiers after her on horseback...

She'd never beat a priestess of Artemis in a footrace, but her detour down the mountainside had given her a jump on her pursuers. She heard the first hoofbeats of mounted calvary as the port of Pagai came within view, along with the welcoming sight of the Adrestia's mast and stays. She could only hope that Barnabas had done what she'd asked and prepared the ship for departure at a moment's notice.

As soon as her feet touched the dock, she shouted, "Barnabas! Undock the ship!"

Barnabas's blessed voice rang out across the yard. "Aye, Captain! Untie the lines, and make it quick, lads!" She could see the crew scurrying across the Adrestia's deck, following orders.

She hurdled a line of enormous clay pots and dodged between slaves carrying bolts of linen, and when the Spartan dockmaster stepped into her path of travel with his hand raised and a "Halt, misthios!" she didn't even break stride as she shoved him aside and into a rack of drying fish. The Adrestia was pulling away from the dock.

The crew had already drawn in the gangplank and the gap between the side of the ship and the pier was growing wider by the moment. She felt a punch between her shoulder blades where something struck her armor, and a clay pot in a pile next to her head suddenly shattered. Archers somewhere behind her. She bared her teeth in a wolf's grin and gathered all the strength and speed she had as the edge of the dock came closer with every step. Three steps, two steps, one, and then her legs were pushing against the edge and she was flying, arms reaching for the Adrestia, her body losing height as the ship came closer...

Her hand hit the rail and scrabbled for purchase against the slick wood, but there was no grip to be found and she felt herself sliding, sliding— until Barnabas grabbed her arm with one strong hand and her armor with his other, and pulled her onto the deck.

"Great Demeter's ghost! You look like you picked a fight with a forest and lost, Captain."

She stood there looking at him and took deep, burning breaths until the war drum in her chest ceased pounding. "Thanks," she said once she could speak again, and then she began to laugh as leaves and pine needles fell from her hair and armor, and her skin began to sting from scrapes and cuts, and she laughed from a place without humor, until it felt like she was choking and tears began to well in her eyes.

Barnabas looked at her with alarm and pulled her closer to him, tucking her face into his shoulder. "Kassandra, what is it? What's wrong?" he asked.

She didn't know.


End file.
